Thank customers on every fifth order

The trigger

One read-only SELECT against PostgreSQL. Rowfire polls it for new rows, and the rule fires on the 1st, 6th, 11th… order per customer.

SELECT o.id AS order_id,
       c.id AS customer_id,
       c.first_name,
       o.total_amount,
       o.completed_at
FROM orders o
JOIN customers c ON c.id = o.customer_id
WHERE o.status = 'completed'
  AND o.paid_at IS NOT NULL
  AND o.is_test = false

The trigger lists completed orders. The key is customer_id and the clock is completed_at. The rule does the counting: with a cadence of every 5th time per key, a customer’s first order fires, then every fifth after it. Table and column names are a sketch; adapt them to your schema.

The Braze side

Bind Braze track_event with external_id set to {{ customer_id }} and an event name such as order_milestone. A campaign triggered by that event sends the thank-you or the reward.

Lifetime milestones instead

If the reward is for a customer’s 5th order ever, put the count in the query: add row_number() OVER (PARTITION BY o.customer_id ORDER BY o.completed_at) as order_number, filter to the milestones you want, and use a once-ever rule keyed by order_id.

The same trigger can carry other rules with other cadences, such as a weekly thank-you or a post to the ops channel for every order. Each rule keeps its own count.

For customers who stopped before checkout, see recover abandoned carts.